Grandmaster (13 page)

He was a fussy dude—overdressed in a gray sports jacket. When he arrived at the table I held out my hand for a shake but he pretended not to see it. While we waited for the command to start our clock, I tried to make polite conversation, but he gave me one glance and then completely ignored me. He took off his expensive watch and laid it down exactly parallel to the edge of the chessboard, checked the lead in his mechanical pencil, and filled out his score sheet in small, perfectly formed letters.

I hated his manners and decided not to go quietly. I knew I couldn’t beat an expert, but maybe I could make him sweat a little. I got through the opening on fairly even terms but dropped a pawn in the middle game, and then I lost a second pawn. Burghoff pressed his advantage and kept glancing impatiently across the table at me, as if waiting for me to give up. He hissed at me at one point: “You have no chance. End this with dignity and resign.”

I probably would have given up against anyone else, but I had taken such a dislike to this guy that I decided to make him sit there and wait. “Don’t talk to me during the game or I’ll have to call over a ref,” I warned him. I took my time on a bunch of fairly obvious moves, and got up to watch my dad because I could tell that if I left the table it would really irritate Burghoff.

Dad looked like he had imploded. He had sunk deep into himself, and his whole body seemed to be trembling, as if his heartbeat was shaking his extremities. But he had absorbed all of Hutchinson’s best shots, and now he was slowly tightening his defensive position, like a boa constrictor choking the breath out of a pesky rodent before devouring it.

“Your dad will win this game,” Grandmaster Liszt whispered as I passed, “but at what cost? Look at him, Daniel! Do yourselves both a favor and get him out of here before it’s too late.”

“Worry about yourself,” I told him. I returned to my own table, took eight minutes to study my obviously lost position, and finally made a move that I could have made in ten seconds. Burghoff rolled his eyes as if to say “Finally” and immediately made his own highly aggressive move. He intended to finish me off and get out of there.

Suddenly I saw it. He had moved too quickly and left himself open to a combination that would win his queen. I made the right move, and he saw what he had fallen into. His body went rigid, as if someone had poured concrete down his spine. He took twenty minutes on his next move, and fifteen on the one after that, searching the board as if looking for a hidden cave beneath the squares where his queen could flee to and escape. But there was no cave, no way out, and eventually he had to make the forced move. I reached across the board and took his queen.

Suddenly I was flooded with so much energy I could barely sit still or think straight. I was a queen up against an expert! “Don’t give it back,” I cautioned myself. “Don’t choke. Just play smart.” Burghoff thrashed and squirmed and set traps and tried for counterplay, but a queen up is a queen up, and the game was soon over. He didn’t shake my hand after the game either—he just stood up in a huff, grabbed his fancy watch, and stalked off.

I felt a tug on my arm. It was Liu. She looked really impressed. “Did you actually beat that guy?” she asked.

“Yeah, I toasted an expert. How about that?” I asked.

“Not bad,” she said.

“Not bad at all,” my dad seconded. He was standing on my other side, smiling at me proudly.

“I assume you beat the young brat?” I asked him.

Dad nodded. “Spanked him and sent him to bed without any supper.”

“Sounds like we may have some reasons to celebrate tonight,” Liu said.

“Not so fast,” Dad cautioned her. “We still have to get through the dreaded fourth round.”

My father’s warning proved prophetic. I came apart in the fourth round and lost very quickly. I was tired from the last game, and my opponent—a kid named Gajanand, who was playing on a team from one of the elite New York public high schools—destroyed me. Still, two and two was a very credible score to finish the second day.

Eric dropped his second game and was also two and two. Brad had won two games, drawn a game, and lost a game, so he was a half point ahead of me at two and a half and one and a half. Dr. Chisolm and Mr. Kinney had won three games and lost one. So all in all, the Mind Cripplers were doing pretty well and were positioned to win the tournament if two things happened. First, we had to do well in the final round. And second, my father had to win his fourth game.

If chess was really war, there was murder and mayhem going on up on the dais—the patzers and the prodigies and the overambitious experts and masters had been sent packing and now the grandmasters were starting to face off. There had been five of them when the tournament started, but one of them—Grandmaster Murray—had drawn a game with a master. That left four undefeated grandmasters going into the final two games: my dad and George Liszt, and Grandmaster Sanchez and Grandmaster Leshkin.

In the fourth round, my dad was paired with Grandmaster Sanchez, the top-rated player in this entire tournament at 2620. I had heard from the tournament gossip mill that Sanchez was one of the strongest players in America and frequently played in international tournaments. He was a small, dignified man in his late thirties, with a calm, polite manner that vanished when he sat down at the chessboard.

It made me feel proud that my father was up on the dais this late in the tournament, matched on fairly even terms with one of the strongest chess players in America. A live feed of the grandmaster games played on large monitor screens out in the common area. I could see my dad and Grandmaster Sanchez concentrating intently, and each time they moved the growing crowd reacted and kibbitzed.

My dad had the white pieces, and I was surprised to see him start off with the Giuoco Piano, the very opening he had cautioned me never to play against stronger players because all its major lines have been analyzed to death. His fourth move brought gasps from the spectators as he moved up his knight pawn, offering it as a sacrifice. I watched on the monitor as Grandmaster Sanchez looked across the board at him, smiled slightly as if to say: “Are you serious?” and then took the pawn.

“I can’t believe he’s playing that!” a tall man near me said.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The Evans Gambit,” the tall man explained. “It was one of the most popular openings two hundred years ago. All the great old masters played it—de la Bourdonnais, Anderssen, and of course Morphy. But no one plays it anymore.”

I had to smile. My father, aware that he hadn’t kept up with the latest advances in chess theory and facing a top young grandmaster, was channeling his boyhood hero, Paul Morphy, and playing a very old opening.

“That’s not quite true,” a studious-looking teenager told the tall man. “Nunn and Timman played the Evans Gambit thirty years ago.”

The tall man shrugged dismissively. “Nunn and Timman? Hardly a revival.”

“And Kasparov defeated Anand with it in 1995,” a man with an authoritative English accent pointed out. “It’s never been completely refuted.”

The crowd grew from fifteen or twenty to thirty, and then to fifty. On the other monitor, I could see George Liszt locked in a tight positional battle with Grandmaster Leshkin.

One by one the Mind Cripplers joined me till our whole team was there, watching. The Evans Gambit put my father down a pawn, but gave him a wide-open attacking game. Both his bishops were soon sweeping long diagonals, and his king was safely castled while the black king was stuck in the center of the board.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous and at the same time more proud of my dad than I was in that hour when he attacked Grandmaster Sanchez with everything he had. The challenge brought out his very best, both in chess and also physically. He was obviously exhausted, but the game energized him. They sat facing each other, concentrating deeply and not saying a word or moving a muscle. They were both completely locked in, going at it with everything they had.

I finally understood what my father had meant back in our home in New Jersey when he told me that true chess was not replaying memorized openings or stale variations but mental combat—two minds in unfamiliar territory, wrestling with each other. Grandmaster Sanchez played a hitherto untried line at move nine, and he and Dad were soon far off down their own unexplored road, with no maps from the past to guide them.

My Mind Crippler teammates were rooting for my father as he sacrificed yet another pawn, and then a knight, to press his attack. “That’s it, Morry, hit him with the kitchen sink,” Randolph enthused, fists clenched.

“Your dad’s a freaking badass giant deep-sea octopus!” Eric said, clapping me on the back. “Look at those tentacles.”

Grandmaster Sanchez took a long time on his twenty-ninth move, and an even longer time on his thirtieth. I couldn’t completely decipher the position, but it was clear that he was worried. The whispers in the lobby swung back and forth: “He’s got this defended.” “No, he’s toast.” “No way Sanchez is going to get caught in some mating net. He’s a world-class player.” “World class or not, he’s not getting out of this one alive.”

I stood there watching my father, and I was sweating profusely in the air-conditioned hall. My knees felt weak, and my hands were clasped tightly, as if some team prayer might help. But I wasn’t praying—I was watching my father do what he was best at, after a lifetime of hiding his talent. Maybe every kid deserves to see his father be a hero just once, for a few minutes.

Liu seemed to understand how I felt—she stood next to me and propped me up slightly with her right hand touching my shoulder. “He’s incredible,” she whispered, and it was so strange to hear someone say that about my bald, potbellied accountant of a father.

“Check,” my father said, when Sanchez finally made his thirtieth move.

This time Sanchez barely hesitated. He stood up and offered his hand. My dad shook it and finally smiled.

Suddenly people were applauding all around me, and my teammates were congratulating me as if I had done something extraordinary. But I was hurrying toward the doors to the tournament hall. The crowd was thick in front of me and I had to fight my way through it, so I reached the double doors just as my father walked out, carrying his score sheet. He saw me and smiled. “Hey, how about that?”

I opened my arms and we embraced. “You were … stupendous,” I told him. I felt the cold sweat all over him, and also that he was trembling. “Are you okay?” I asked him.

“Sure,” he said, and then he passed out in my arms.

22

The EMTs had gone and Dr. Chisolm had finished his own examination, and now Dad lay on his bed in our suite with his legs propped up on pillows so that his head was lower than his knees. He was taking occasional sips of bottled water, breathing in through his nostrils and exhaling from his mouth, and trying to make a joke out of the whole thing. “That’s what happens when you beat somebody over 2600,” he said. “And if you beat someone over 2700 your nose falls off your face.”

“Well, your nose is still fastened in the right place, but it wouldn’t hurt you to go to an emergency room,” Dr. Chisolm told him. “Just to be safe. They can run some tests on you that I can’t run here…”

“You checked out my heart, and the ambulance guys ran plenty of tests,” Dad told him. “I feel fine now. It was just nerves. It’s happened before. If I go to an emergency room I’m gonna sit there for half the night waiting to be seen, and then they’ll keep me for observation. I won’t be in any shape to finish the tournament tomorrow.”

“I’m not sure you should play tomorrow,” Mr. Kinney told him. “Much as I’d like to win this thing.”

“I’m playing,” Dad said softly but with determination. “I’ve come too far. I’m not backing down.” He glanced at Dr. Chisolm. “My heart’s fine, right, Sam?”

“I see no sign of arrhythmia, or any other cardiac condition,” Dr. Chisolm admitted. “You say you have a history of anxiety-related fainting. The fact that you remember seeing spots just before you collapsed is an indication of reduced blood flow to the brain, which can certainly be caused by an extreme nervous reaction. But all that being said, Morris, we need to err on the side of safety.”

“Listen to Dr. Chisolm,” I urged my father. “Be safe. To hell with the tournament. Let’s run every test, stay the night in a hospital, and then go home. That’s what Mom said we should do…”

“No way I’m spending tonight in a hospital and no way I’m going home early,” my father declared resolutely. Then he smiled at me and took my hand, and he really did look much better. “Look, Daniel, I understand that you’re worried, but I’ve had this before, and it passes. I know my own body. Let’s go do the karaoke party. What I need is to relax and sing a little Elvis.”

“Forget the karoke,” Dr. Chisolm told him. “At the very least you should stay in the hotel and rest. We can order something healthy from room service.”

Dad sat up in bed, looking and sounding a bit like a rebellious child who was refusing to take his medicine. “I don’t want hotel food. And I
really
need to take my mind off chess for a little while. I appreciate all your concern, but we made a plan and let’s stick to it.” He looked at Liu’s mother, who was part of the small throng of team members and concerned friends that had gathered in our hotel suite. “We have a reservation at Lucky Hana’s Hall of Karaoke for nine p.m., right?”

“I canceled that, Morris,” Liu’s mom said. “We’ll do it another time.”

“Uncancel it,” he snapped. “I want to go. This is just silly.” He stood up from the bed and looked around. “Where’s my jacket? Daniel, are you ready?”

“We’re not leaving this hotel, unless we head to a hospital,” I told him.

He looked back at me and then at the other people in the suite, and there was a long, silent impasse.

“I’ve got an idea,” Randolph finally said. “Why don’t we do the karaoke party right here at the Palace Royale? We can set it up in my suite and bring in some Japanese food.”

“Where are you going to rent a karaoke machine at this hour?” Liu’s mother asked.

“Leave that to me,” Mr. Kinney told her. “This is Manhattan. For the right price, you can get anything, day or night. What do you say, Morris?”